February 23, 2012

Rapportive, a San Francisco-based startup that offers a free, enhanced contact information add-on for Google´s Gmail, has just been acquired by LinkedIn, the two companies confirmed on Wednesday.

“In business, partnership is dating – and we went on a lot of dates with LinkedIn. Slowly, but surely, we fell in love,” wrote Rapportive CEO Rahul Vohra in a blog post on Wednesday confirming the acquisition.

"At LinkedIn, we will support Rapportive, and we will continue to build beautiful products that make you brilliant with people,” he wrote.

Rapportive was founded in 2010, and has received funding from Y Combinator and Gmail creator Paul Buchheit. The company´s Gmail add-on displays social media information about a contact when a user sends an email to that person, or hovers their cursor over a contact's name. The display includes the contact´s recent tweets and other relevant information from a Facebook or other social media account, including LinkedIn.

Rapportive says its plugin looks up more than 20 million contacts per month.

Mountain View, CA-based LinkedIn confirmed the purchase in an email from Hani Durzy, the company's director of corporate communications.

"Rapportive does a great job at delivering relevant information in a platform that is universally used by professionals -- email. It's very much in line with LinkedIn's mission to make professionals more productive and successful in their careers," he wrote.

Neither company disclosed the price of the acquisition, but a TechCrunch report earlier this month placed the price at roughly $15 million in cash. A separate report earlier this month from the website All Things D estimated the purchase price in the “low teens” of millions of dollars.